A new interview regarding Pokemon Red and Blue has popped up. It explains the hardware limitations that Game Freak had to deal with when developing the Game Boy classics. “It was difficult,” Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda said. “The thing we wanted to focus on at the start was communication and trading but it was difficult to do that as we could only transfer small amounts of data between two consoles. Communication itself was a big challenge – the technology just wasn’t there but we really wanted to do it, so we fought to get it in there. That was an overriding theme – it was a fight against capacity, a fight against what we could fit onto the cartridge. We had designed these 150-odd Pokémon to get in as well. But then we had the problem of movement, so we came up with the idea of the map tiles being the things that moved while the character was animated in place. With these ideas, we found ways to squeeze as much in as we possibly could. I like the Game Boy as a machine but trying to work with all these challenges and make a game that anyone could get into and enjoy was difficult.”
Source: Nintendo Everything
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